Collapse: Al Gore and the Green Movement

This blog noted that Walter Russell Mead had hit something big, when he likened Al Gore’s fight against global warming to guilty Hollywood celebs absolving themselves by taking on public crusades. The Mead essay was the first of three about Al Gore, and dealt with Gore the private carbon burner, embracing a public cause that assuages his guilt.

In the second essay, Mead takes on Al Gore’s Green Movement itself, a force that had it succeeded, would have moved us closer to world government. How could such an ambitious cause gain such non-critical, widespread support? The intellectuals involved truly believe they have the answer to the world’s problems, and the answer is their superior wisdom. Mead takes exception to such uncritical thinking:

The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet [Al] Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a [global green treaty] is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.

The green movement’s core tactic is . . . to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.

In the third and final essay on Al Gore, Mead ties him to the American progressive movement, which flourished in the early 20th century. It floundered after the collapse of Woodrow Wilson’s effort to get us into Wilson’s League of Nations and with the progressive-dictated failure to impose prohibition on Americans’ private lives. But the collapse of unfretted capitalism following the 1929 crash gave progressivism a second chance, and it came back stronger than ever under Roosevelt’s New Deal, carrying on in some form through subsequent Democratic administrations.

Now Mead believes Al Gore and progressivism have truly reached the end of their road:

Al Gore . . . comes at the tail end of [the progressive] tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time. He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more. . . Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse.

Today growing numbers of Americans resent and reject the tutelage of well meaning elites — and they view with suspicion the claims of ‘experts’ to be dispassionate and disinterested custodians of the public good. They don’t see civil servants as unselfish and apolitical experts who can be trusted to regulate and rule; they see them as a lobby like any other, a special interest more interested in preserving fat pensions and easy working conditions — and at foisting their own ideological hobby horses and preferences on the public at large.

It seems Mead has a clear view of the country's seasonal change. The progressive era, its Indian Summer has passed.